Beware The Fractured Mirror Of Digital Technology

Our digital devices are history’s first “natural” technology. The printing press and the telephone, for example, each changed the world by doing a particular task. But digital technology doesn’t do a singular thing; it’s the medium on which we do nearly everything. We use it for driving, working out, entertainment, conversations, dating, school, worship, shopping, and planning vacations. Unlike past world-changing inventions, digital technology is involved in every area of our lives. It’s “natural” in that it’s always with us, capturing our attention like no technology ever has.

Paradoxically, however, digital technology captures our attention while fading into the background. Like a mirror, it’s designed to reflect “reality” back to us. We aren’t attracted so much to our devices as to the seemingly “frictionless” uses and “objective” pictures they offer. When Apple introduced the iPad 3, they made this goal clear: “We believe technology is at its very best when it’s invisible, when you’re conscious only of what you’re doing, not the device you’re doing it with. . . . We think it’s going to change how you see and do just about everything.” It’s our devices’ invisibility, the way they frame the world without us giving them much thought, that makes them so transformative.

In A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, Antón Barba-Kay contends that digital technology—everything from our computers and phones to our smart lawnmowers—isn’t just another stage in technological history. Rather, it’s a unique technology, ushering in a new way of life and transforming us in the process.

Technology Directs Our Behavior

Digital technology tacitly holds us captive, directing our behavior. On the surface, this may seem far-fetched—our devices feel neutral, even liberating. Yet this sense of neutrality combined with the seeming insignificance of each individual click and swipe makes the repatterning of our behavior so effective. As Barba-Kay observes, “The more the terms of our digital choices seem intuitive, invisible, or ‘democratic’ to us (as the pure reflection of ‘our’ preferences), the stronger the indication that we can longer see how they are utterly refashioning those very preferences” (229).

The online world isn’t just in the business of getting and keeping our attention. Its aim is to push our buttons: coaxing us to behave in certain ways while making us feel like “we are our own bosses every step of the way” (228). When we’re scrolling on our phones or streaming whatever we decide to watch next on our big screens, we feel free. We’re in the driver’s seat. So we think. But that’s the racket of “choice architecture” that uses data analytics to measure “not just what I click on, but in what order, how often, and how long I spend on each page” to direct our actions. Sure, we’re in the driver’s seat, but we’re driving “the routes that have been minutely and thoroughly planned for us to spend time and money on” (229).

Forced labor can only be imposed by the strong. But when we become convinced that bondage is freedom, the master is all the more dominant. And the servants slave away even harder.

Technology Makes Data the New Authority

Digital technology redefines our ideal for the way humans ought to think because it’s so efficient in collecting and regurgitating massive amounts of information. Most of us don’t understand algorithmic calculations and the statistical models that serve as the foundations of the algorithms  (or the biases involved in any data collection and the assumptions of these models); nonetheless, we increasingly yield to what the experts tell us the algorithmically synthesized data “says.”

The online world is not just in the business of getting and keeping our attention. Its aim is to push our buttons.

For example, most football coaches don’t fully understand why the analytics are telling them to go for it on 4th and 2. Yet if the play fails, coaches can shield themselves from their critics with an appeal to the authority and supposed objectivity of analytics. Now transfer the coach’s logic to matters of human flourishing, to issues such as justice, war, and medicine.

Certainly, analytics has its uses, especially for the narrow questions of life. But it increasingly leads to a shallow form of rationality, even as it reduces our accountability and agency. Instead of growing in wisdom through experience, rightly ordering our loves, and learning to walk in virtue, we cede our judgments to an allegedly “neutral way of representing collective preference. We alienate the site of judgment from ourselves, choosing to forget that the outcome is only as good as the people who have made it” (235). To modernize C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, we might ask, Who needs “chests” when we have our devices?

By trusting in this reductive, algorithmic approach to answer life’s big questions, we allow ourselves to “be governed by our own creations.” Barba-Kay argues, “At bottom, this outsourcing of human judgment to data is also a form of the primitive impulse to idolatry.” It helps fulfill our “desire to obey ourselves” (235).

Becoming like Our Creations

Computers are getting better at acting like humans, while we’re getting better at acting like computers. Humans were created to respond to other minds like our own. Digital technology uses this tendency to form us in its own image. According to Barba-Kay, “Digital technology’s greatest success is to captivate our intentions by seeming to answer to them, and then by inducing us to reread our own intentions in the terms offered to us” (237). This convergence of algorithm and human mind leads to the creators becoming like our creations.

As social creatures, we learn whom we should aspire to be from others. We increasingly engage with our devices in a habitual I-thou relationship by treating our devices as if they have souls. Thus we learn how to be human from “the shape of our own intentions and of the social world quantified, aggregated, projected into digital form” (237). We speak to a created reflection of ourselves—except we view it as a higher version of ourselves, a mimetic ideal we can aspire to become.

We long to find ourselves in our devices. But the gap between us and artificial intelligence forces us to remake ourselves in the lesser image of our creations. Beneath this syncing up of ourselves with our devices is “a dream of total rational control, a desire to render ourselves and the world fully transparent to technical scrutiny” (240). Barba-Kay continues, “We long to find ourselves unbound from our dependence on what’s given—on chance, on nature, history, and natality—no longer begotten but self-made” (241).

By hoping in the devices we’ve crafted in our self-image, we become like them—blind to our dependence, unable to feel as we should, without “chests.” We become less human, less alive. It’s as if the psalmist (Ps. 115) and the prophet Isaiah (Isa. 44–48) saw it coming.

Cruciform Patterns of Life

Some will be tempted to write Barba-Kay off as a grumpy Luddite, nostalgic for the good ole days of sending letters for basic correspondence, spending our Friday evenings browsing the aisles at Blockbuster, and making do with a higher rate of medical misdiagnosis. But these overly defensive dismissals blind us to the wisdom we stand to gain.

Barba-Kay admits digital technology has improved and will continue to improve our lives in particular ways. However, he doesn’t leave us guessing about his basic evaluation: “I regard the digital revolution as a basically dehumanizing force” (4). His account is a bleak and sobering diagnosis of our present situation, but one that’s more incisive than the popular, partisan jeremiads about the “the culture.” A Web of Our Own Making is valuable to the church because it lays bare how we’re all being conformed to patterns of the digital world.

Most of us don’t understand algorithmic calculations and the statistical models that serve as the foundations of the algorithms; nonetheless, we increasingly yield to what the experts tell us the algorithmically synthesized data “says.”

The church must get beyond recognizing the problem. In contrast to idolatry’s effects that Barba-Kay diagnoses, in Christ we experience a counterformation: true freedom, a renewed mind, and the true fulfillment of our desires. The Scriptures are the frame we must continue to look through. By the Spirit and with the church’s collective wisdom, we’re called to discern the faithful patterns of life in today’s digital world.

The faithful way forward will be more countercultural and less exciting than many will accept. It’ll require turning our attention to simple acts of repeated fidelity: Showing up in person week after week to church services that aren’t designed to entertain. Putting down our devices to attend to our lonely loved ones, neglected neighbors, and cultural enemies. Gathering around the Scriptures as families to read and pray. Guarding times for personal communion with God. Embracing the vulnerability that comes with sharing the gospel in person.

In these modest acts of digital resistance, we echo the humility of the saints who’ve gone before us, reflecting the patterns that God has used in surprising ways. In our digital age, these beatitudinal ways of life will increasingly appear quaint and feeble, so the temptation will only become stronger to accept the terms of our digital world—for efficiency, control, optimization, and “going viral” have become our age’s norming norms.

When the game is rigged, the only way to “win” is to take a path that at first looks like sure defeat (Matt. 16:25). Lest we forget the scandal of the cross. We’re more than conquerors, but our victory comes through the “weakness” of the inefficient, the local, the embodied, and the sacrificial—the body of Christ testifying to our Master’s wisdom and strength (1 Cor. 1:18–30; 2 Cor. 12:9–10).